Once evicted, Tanya Dennis finally gets her home back

posted by Lana N. | 3pt
August 25, 2011

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="190" caption="Tanya Dennis won her home back after a bitter battle with Wells Fargo"][/caption]It feels good to get a win. One of the earliest stories we covered on this blog was Tanya Dennis' fight to keep her South Berkeley home. A former high school vice-principal, Dennis got behind on her mortgage payments when an injury required her to have back surgery. The medical bills combined with the time away from work made it impossible for her to catch up on her mortgage payments, but Wells Fargo refused to let her go through any sort of loan modification process and foreclosed on her home.Uncommonly, Dennis decided to fight back after being evicted. She called a locksmith and regained access to her home. She got help from community organizations like ACCE and swarmed Wells Fargo executives with hundreds of e-mails and phone calls. She led a delegation from her community to Wells Fargo headquarters in San Francisco and refused to leave until they agreed to review her loan.And now, after eight months of fighting back, Dennis finally has an agreement in principle with Wells Fargo to modify her loan, which will allow her to keep her house of 27 years.The outrageous thing about the whole affair is that Wells Fargo, along with a lot of other big banks in America, made a lot of terrible bets over the last decade, a lot worse bets than Tanya Dennis made on her back. But Wells Fargo got $25 billion in taxpayer money from the federal government to cover their butts. That money was supposed to prop up banks, allowing them to lend again and to help troubled homeowners who had lost jobs in a crippling recession. Instead, it took relentless pressure by Tanya Dennis and a multitude of supporters to keep her in her home.